Gabe Newell, managing director of Valve Software, spoke with GameSpot's Elliott Chin briefly before heading on over to London where he will attend the gaming show ECTS (and show off the latest build of Half-Life). We asked Newell to comment on the game's development and what it takes to get an oozing, sticky, blood-filled title into the European market.

　　GameSpot: Considering you are attending ECTS, do you view the European market to be as big as the American market when it comes to action games?Gabe Newell: The European market isn't quite as big as the US, but it still represents a huge portion of the worldwide action-game market. We certainly pay a lot of attention to the preferences and requirements of gamers in Europe. Team Fortress was initially successful in England before its popularity spread to the US.

　　GameSpot: Obviously, strategy games do well (look at C&C and Starcraft), but do 3D shooters succeed, considering how violent they are? In Germany, might that pose a problem? What must be done to your game, if anything, to ready it for the German market?GN: There's this incongruity that the German content restrictions legislate against the kind of content that is acceptable in most of the rest of the world, yet the action-game category itself is incredibly popular in Germany. I have heard that in some cases Germany represented as much as 25 percent of the worldwide sales of particular games.

　　You absolutely have to pay attention to their content restrictions and design the game accordingly. The German version of Half-Life will have different models and different programmatic behaviors in order to comply with their laws. Fortunately by planning for this in advance, and by working closely with the bureaucrats in Germany responsible for overseeing adherence to these rules, we think we've done a good job of being in compliance with their standards without having to lose what makes Half-Life a special game.

　　GameSpot: The original ship was supposed to be June, but now EB lists Half-Life as arriving November 2. What's been behind the delays?GN: It's a cliche that has been abused, but we're going to ship Half-Life when it's done. That involves a tremendous amount of detail and tons and tons of play testing. Given what the play testers are saying, I am pretty sure people are going to be very happy with the game, delays and all.

　　GameSpot: With gamers hooked on Quake II, Unreal, and the SiN demo, why would they want to play Half-Life? What about Half-Life do you think will lure gamers away from those other games?GN: We ask people to compare Half-Life with those games when they come in to play test, and pretty much 100 percent of the time they say Half-Life has a more immersive world, a vastly better AI, a story that matters, cooler gameplay, better art, and so on. About the only person who didn't give us a win across the board was this one guy who runs an Unreal fan site who said that he thought that Unreal's volumetric fog and detail textures were cooler than Half-Life's beam effects and skeletal animation. Unreal's volumetric fog is really cool.

　　Ordinarily I'd answer this question by enumerating the technology and gameplay advances we've made over the games you've listed, but it's great to be able to say "we've had a whole bunch of people play it for several hours, and they say it's the best action game around.

　　GameSpot: How did Unreal's release affect Half-Life's development? Was there anything in Unreal that the Valve guys thought they needed to add to Half-Life?GN: We've met with Tim Sweeney several times, both before and after Unreal shipped. We had a pretty good idea what they were doing and the kind of technical trade-offs they were making. We are really comfortable with what Half-Life is trying to achieve, and that hasn't changed as aresult of Unreal shipping.